Keith Magill: Who did Americans just elect as president?

Tuesday

Nov 29, 2016 at 1:17 PMNov 29, 2016 at 1:17 PM

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Less than three weeks after Americans elected him president, Donald Trump is delivering on his reputation as a prolific liar, breaking so many campaign promises it’s hard to keep up.That wall he was going to build across the U.S. border with Mexico? Now, he says, a fence across part of the border will suffice.

Remember his pledge during a nationally televised debate to prosecute Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton for her reckless use of email during her tenure as secretary of state? Trump now says that won’t be happening. Even his friends at the Breitbart right-wing propaganda factory are miffed that Trump reneged on his pledge to throw “Crooked Hillary” in the slammer.

It’s going to be difficult for the president-elect to “drain the swamp” in Washington when he has surrounded himself with some of the same lobbyists and political insiders he condemned during his campaign.

One of the promises I’m happy Trump broke is his change of heart on global warming. Before the election, he called climate change a “hoax,” a “con job” and a “myth.” Now he acknowledges what an overwhelming consensus of scientists suggests: That climate change is real and is caused by humans. A president who thinks that way is far more likely to respond effectively to Louisiana’s coastal plight than someone who believes a cold day in Manhattan is evidence that global warming is a hoax. A climate change believer is more likely to do something about the sinking land, eroding coastal wetlands and rising seas that scientists say will inundate Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes, and the rest of south Louisiana by 2100 unless something significant is done to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Trump has scaled down his pledges to lead a mass deportation of illegal aliens, embraced part of the Obamacare health insurance program he vowed to abolish and waffled, reneged or backed off on a litany of other promises that I have linked to online for anyone who cares to do the research.

I’ll go out on a limb and say few readers will be interested in research. Both front-runners waged relatively fact-free campaigns, and that was just fine with a lot of their supporters. And, as I noted before the election, Americans have become so partisan they will vote for almost any brand-name candidate who appeals to their preconceived beliefs and aspirations, even if it means accepting false promises, mediocre credentials or outright lies. That is, if they were aware of the lies at all.

One of the debates du jour is whether the proliferation of fake news on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter might have influenced the presidential election’s results. Unfortunately, I suspect that for too many people, whether the news is real or fake is inconsequential. For many of the partisans in my life, real news is whatever they agree with and fake news is everything else.

Facts or no facts, most Americans knew they weren’t going to like the results of this presidential election. Polls consistently showed 60 percent of voters disliked both front-runners. Many ended up voting for one candidate because it wasn’t the other.

Now that the election is over, however, excuses like “at least it’s not Hillary” are less convincing. Americans have elected Trump, not “not Hillary.” Still, after flip-flopping on so many of his campaign promises, Trump’s supporters, and anyone else, would be justified in wondering exactly who America did elect as its next president.

— Keith Magill is the executive editor for The Courier in Houma, La. and The Daily Comet in Thibodaux, La. He can be reached at 985-857-2201 or keith.magill@houmatoday.com. Follow him on Twitter @CourierEditor.

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